Henry V (1944)

Henrik den Femte

”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne’r so base and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhood cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

Thus goes the most famous of quotes from Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, one of its main contributions to world cultural heritage.

See, I do not diminish or scorn Shakespeare. He was a giant and still is. Yet he is not my cup of tea.

At the risk of universal scorn and outrage I admit to generally avoiding Shakespeare. Oh, his stories are absolutely great and often founds the basis of almost any storytelling since, no doubt of that. It is the form I am objecting to. Shakespeare’s plays were written for the stage 400 years ago. They are to be declared rather than acted and by some common consensus must be using the exact phrasing as it was written by Shakespeare. That makes me very very tired. I find it difficult to keep my focus and I am constantly lost to what is actually going on. Call me a plebeian, there you have it.

Still Shakespeare is kept in such high regard that until fairly recently it was considered sacrilege to change much or adapt even the wording of his plays and if you acted or produced a play of Shakespeare you could be almost certain of praise and acclaim and likely a little golden statue of some denomination would find your way. Thus both on the stage and in the cinema the Shakespearian theater has flourished in almost unchanged form, usually without me as audience.

Laurence Olivier’s “Henry V” is all that. Since I never read “Henry V” I cannot say this with any certainty, but if someone told me that this version is word for word the original play, I would believe him. This is what it feels like. Encumbered by this dialogue it moves forward at a snail pace. Dialogue is maybe not the right term. Sequential monologues would be more fitting.

Yet, Olivier does make an interesting deviation from the form. To begin with the movie is an act of theater itself. It takes place around 1600 in the Globe Theater in London complete with costumes spectators. A movie of a play acted on a stage. This is almost meta. My first thought was that what he really wanted was to play this exactly as it was written, on a stage, declared to the audience and without even moving the performance to present times. A truly purist rendition. But then, after the initial acts, the stage is gradually transformed to the likeness of reality. It is now less a play and more a movie and the transition is so smooth we hardly notice it before the king boards a ship in Southampton. If only the dialogue had made the same transition…

The problem of course is that change of scenery does not alone make “Henry V” less theatrical. The artificial permeates every scene and not only from the script. The painted backgrounds, the spotless costumes and even the garish colors all contribute. The climax, the battle of Agincourt itself is almost comic in its stylized battle scenes and pompous knights, colorful as peacocks riding into battle. We even got a Homerian one-on-one battle between the commanders of the two armies with an audience of soldiers forming a ring around them to watch as if this was the battle of Troy. The battle is a mess and I got totally confused. Who won? Well, the English we are told. How? No idea. They just did.

As you, my dear reader, will have noticed by now the faults I find with this film all harken back from its source, the fact that this is literally a play by Shakespeare. If you are a Shakespeare nut you are going to love this film. If not, well, then you are in my shoes. However if you have to make a movie version of a Shakespeare play and are confined to do it as literally as possible then you could hardly do it better than Olivier did. It is beautiful. It is dramatic. It has all the Shakespearian flavor you might want. In that sense this is a very successful film, no complaints.      

Then of course there is the context of this film. 1944, England, WWII and the upcoming invasion of Normandy. This is a call to arms. Your country needs you to fight a war, fair and just, to valiantly follow your commander across the Channel into France where a fearsome enemy waits who will likely outnumber you. But you, English soldier, you will hold the moral upper ground so victory is yours if you stand by your cause.

”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne’r so base and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhood cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”